Wednesday, 23 February 2011

Opera now used by over 100 million mobile surfers, dominates iOS browser

Opera, now with a combined total of over 100 million Mini and Mobile users, dominates the mobile browser market. While Mobile has a very valiant 15 million users, it is Opera Mini with over 90 million users and 52 billion page views in January 2011 that really steals the show. Those figures don't include phones that come with Opera pre-installed, incidentally.

The maths are more complicated than they first look, though. There's no doubt that Opera's share of the mobile browser share is shrinking -- in direct correlation with Android's growth -- but at the same time, there's no doubt in terms of platforms that iOS dominates the mobile surfing market. One conclusion, which is suggested by Opera's own figures, is that iOS users are using Opera Mini over the stock browser -- and in the U.K. and U.S., the iPhone is actually Opera Mini's most-used platform.

There's no avoiding the fact that Opera's stronghold is on Nokia phones, though. If you leaf through Opera's State of the Mobile Web, it's rare to find less than 9 Nokia phones in each country's top 10 handsets. There's also no Android phones to be found -- but that's more to do with the sheer variety of Android phones than anything else. Still, despite the much-belabored and over-blogged Rise of the Smartphone, Opera's growth doesn't look like it's slowing down.

Smartphones might be set for massive growth in the West, but Opera looks set to dominate every territory east of the EU -- and with over 4 billion people on that side of the world, we don't think you'll hear Opera complaining.